It is the practice of some retailers to formulate and execute custom product assortment and product placement plans, or planograms, for individual retail facilities. A planogram indicates the assortment of products to be offered for sale at the facility, the placement of those products within the facility's sales floor, and the amount of display space devoted to each product, often measured in linear feet of shelf space. In creating planograms, retailers often draw on known demographic, sales history, or other data to predict demand preferences of a facility's customers. Because demand varies among facilities, a retailer may create and implement a wide variety of corresponding planograms. Planners may update planograms by subscribing facilities to receive revisions at regular intervals based on a predicted variation in demand. For instance, a retailer may wish to alter a planogram to offer seasonal items, to respond to demographic changes in the facility's customer base, or to test the effectiveness of an alternative product assortment or placement configuration. Centralized planograming is thus an important tool in effectively managing retail inventory and increasing sales.
After a planogram has been implemented, planners may collect and analyze sales data in order to optimize future product offerings. Planners are interested in identifying particular product placement configurations, or adjacencies, that maximize sales. They are also interested in identification of products that are more attractive to, and thus more profitable in, certain demographic regions. Planogram-based sales data is also valuable to product manufacturers and suppliers, who may wish to adjust characteristics of their products to maximize appeal to shoppers. This information may be sold by retailers to manufacturers or used by retailers to secure more favorable terms in their commercial dealings with the manufacturers.
Knowledge of a retail facility's compliance with a planogram is an important factor in collecting viable planogram-based sales data. It is therefore desirable for planners to monitor compliance in such a way as to provide a highly accurate and highly current picture of the state of a facility's stocking configuration as it relates to its planogram. Planogram revisions may be frequent if a facility is operating under a subscription model, and inefficient monitoring may unduly delay the reporting of planogram-based data. Efficient planogram compliance monitoring therefore requires a timely flow of organized information from the retail facility to the planners. Specifically, planners wish to know whether a facility has been delinquent in implementing a planogram, whether the planogram was implemented incompletely, or whether it was implemented incorrectly.
Systems and methods have been developed for monitoring planogram compliance. These systems, however, depend primarily on manual inspection conducted on a sales floor. Manual inspection is time consuming, expensive, and prone to error. The resulting audit information is often unavailable to planners until after the information has become stale. A need therefore exists to automatically and accurately monitor retail facility planogram compliance remotely with a high frequency of reporting. Ideally, the reporting frequency would be high enough to supply a “real time” view of the facility's compliance.
One well known and widely used method of gathering data relating to retail merchandise generally is the use of radio-frequency-identification (RFID) tags. RFID tags in the retail context often electronically store data relating to a product or products that can later be read using radio waves. RFID tag readers modulate and demodulate radio waves that are transmitted and received via an antenna or an array of antennas. When an RFID tag passes within range of an antenna, the reader collects information embedded in the tag.
Two types of RFID tags are generally available: active and passive. Passive tags rely solely on the powered antennas to provide the radio waves. Active tags are equipped with a power source, usually a battery, and call out or signal at predetermined intervals. Active tags enjoy an increased range over passive tags, but at a greater cost per tag. In some configurations, the additional cost of powered tags is offset by savings created by a reduction of the number of necessary antennas. In other configurations, active tags are necessary to overcome environmental conditions that may interfere with the radio signal, such as a large amount of metals or liquids.